No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
‘For I was tired of England Sir’: English pauper emigrant strategies, 1834–60 1
Abstract
Poor people assisted to emigrate by their parish officers have long been associated with Charles Buller's memorable phrase 'shovelling out paupers'. Poor people were depicted as passive victims of the elite's schemes, thoughtlessly dumped into a new world. This paper challenges that view by stressing the resourcefulness of poor people who secured assistance to emigrate by detailing a wide number of strategies which poor emigrants employed to secure assistance. It is argued that poor emigrants often initiated the emigratory process as a consequence of receiving some information about the New World. It is further argued that their motivations and concerns were not far removed from those emigrants who received no assistance, and that the rich details available for assisted emigration can be used to exemplify the process, a notoriously slippery subject. Furthermore, the material generated by assisted emigration presents rare insights into the process of negotiation and interaction between rich and poor in rural England in the aftermath of the introduction of the new Poor Law.
Colonising Disability explores the construction and treatment of disability across Britain and its empire from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Esme Cleall explores how disability increasingly became associated with 'difference' and argues that it did so through intersecting with other categories of otherness such as race. Philanthropic, legal, literary, religious, medical, educational, eugenistic and parliamentary texts are examined to unpick representations of disability that, overtime, became pervasive with significant ramifications for disabled people. Cleall also uses multiple examples to show how disabled people navigated a wide range of experiences from 'freak shows' in Britain, to missions in India, to immigration systems in Australia, including exploring how they mobilised to resist discrimination and constitute their own identities. By assessing the intersection between disability and race, Dr Cleall opens up questions about 'normalcy' and the making of the imperial self.
In 1805, Thomas Douglas, fifth Earl of Selkirk published what was to become a famous book, Observations on the Present State of the Highlands of Scotland, with a View of the Causes and Probable Consequences of Emigration. It was a book which aroused much critical comment on publication but eventually had a major impact on British thinking about emigration and the empire. It was written at a key moment in the formation of the British Empire, just after the resumption of war with what had become Napoleonic Europe, and arguably as a publication, it contributed to the identification of British North America as an important destination for British emigrants. Selkirk came from the southwest of Scotland, not far from the English border, and never saw the Scottish Highlands until he was taken on a Highland tour by his tutor as a young gentleman. After inheriting his title and a considerable fortune, Selkirk became involved in plans to encourage Highlanders emigrating after 1801, to choose Canadian destinations rather than continue to follow established chains of emigration to what had become the United States. It was Selkirk, rather than Robert Wilmot Horton or Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who was the father of the idea that emigrants from Britain should be assisted to go where they were most needed in the empire.
After the passage of the first Passenger Act in 1803, the tide of public opinion in Britain regarding emigration began to turn. The long debate over assisted emigration eventually would be the medium through which emigration came to be perceived as a positive force in imperial expansion rather than a threat to the project of modernising the country. Perhaps that was as a result of the limitations to modernisation that became increasingly apparent after 1815, as postwar depression began to bite. There was a sense of economic crisis in Britain throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, although parts of the country continued to expand commercially and industrially. But there were obvious winners and losers, with the losers and those who thought they might be losers increasingly becoming interested in emigration, and the winners increasingly minded to allow them to emigrate. Within that change in the ideology of emigration, there was growing debate over whether to channel emigrants to the overseas empire or turn a blind eye to the growing importance of the United States as an emigrant destination. In 1801–1803, part of the anti-emigration rhetoric had been about preventing emigrants to add to the strength of the United States, and the initial interest in assisting emigrants to go to Canada had been to ensure that Canada would remain British and not become American.
Like any number of writers on the emigrant’s prospects abroad, Mason celebrated a particularly robust reading of the ideal emigrant, but equally counselled great care in choosing a destination. It was imperative not to embark until sufficient information had been gathered on the conditions awaiting. Accustomed to the comforts and conveniences of life in England, he warned, emigrants should not expect to find the same in ‘wild uninhabited lands’. Life there was much more demanding, and many who emigrated were quite unfit for the venture and would never have quitted their homes had they any idea of the hardships they would face. Thornley Smith complained that some left England for the Cape colony with the erroneous belief that wealth would flow there like a mighty stream and, only a few weeks after their arrival, ‘sad disappointment is their lot’. According to the Emigrant’s Friend, in all colonies during their early stages difficulties abounded. There were no crops, no specie, no establishments of any size and no society. The first settlers were destined to ‘hard work, privation, and too often ruin’, Mundy avowed. These were men of the axe, shovel, pickaxe, beard and ‘leathern apron’, with their guns always at the ready, like an advance column in battle.1
Few measures, if any, could claim to have had a greater impact on British society than the poor law. As a comprehensive system of relieving those in need, the poor law provided relief for a significant proportion of the population but influenced the behaviour of a much larger group that lived at or near the margins of poverty. It touched the lives of countless numbers of individuals not only as paupers but also as ratepayers, guardians, officials and magistrates. This system underwent significant change in the nineteenth century with the shift from the old to the new poor law. The extent to which changes in policy anticipated new legislation is a key question and is here examined in the context of London. Rapid population growth and turnover, the lack of personal knowledge between rich and poor, and the close proximity of numerous autonomous poor law authorities created a distinctly metropolitan context for the provision of relief. This work provides the first detailed study of the poor law in London during the period leading up to and after the implementation of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources the book focuses explicitly on the ways in which those involved with the poor law - both as providers and recipients - negotiated the provision of relief. In the context of significant urban change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, it analyses the poor law as a system of institutions and explores the material and political processes that shaped relief policies.
In 1836 under the auspices of section 62 of the New Poor Law, 3,069 poor people from Norfolk were assisted to emigrate to North America. Their passages, and various other requirements including spending money, travel to the port, equipment for the voyage and settling of debts, were paid for out of the poor rates. The rationale for this outflow of people revolved around the issue of surplus labour, which was believed to have a corrosive and unsettling effect upon the state of rural society. Emigration had long been seen as a potential safety valve for surplus labour. Clause 62 can be traced back to the vigorous debate about assisted emigration associated with Robert Wilmot Horton. For one emigration season, it looked as if parochial government were capable of rising to the challenge of solving its surplus labour problems and simultaneously satisfying the needs of the labour-hungry British colonies. This paper examines the Norfolk emigration fever by using a previously unused data set of nineteenth-century emigration (Ministry of Health files held at the Public Record Office). It argues that assisted emigration was the result of a concerted rational policy, applied by the parish officers aimed to benefit emigrants and those left behind. The policy was neither haphazard nor accidental and, though inspired by fear of the consequences of implementing the New Poor Law, was not a panicked response. It argues that the arrangements for assisted emigration resulted in a process of interchange and interaction between rich and poor which makes a mockery of the term ‘shovelling out paupers’. The poor emigrants who were targeted were assisted because they were good labourers, not useless indigents incapable of providing for themselves. The findings shed further light on the nature of emigrating populations, the emigratory process and the mindset of both rich and poor at the time of the introduction of the New Poor Law.
Nineteenth-century assisted emigration has long been associated with the phrase ‘shovelling out paupers’. This view is challenged by the actions and attitudes of the sponsors of parish-assisted emigration who invested considerable time and energy in supporting the emigration of their poor. Close investigation of the policy that was applied at the local level for the rural counties of Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Norfolk suggests that assisted emigration was seen as a policy in which rich and poor interacted to secure mutual benefits. Assisted emigration was conceived as a way of helping individual paupers while simultaneously displaying a continued concern for the labouring population. Faced with the challenges of the New Poor Law, the farming class viewed assisted emigration as part of an older tradition of paternalistic help for the ‘deserving poor’. Sponsors were well aware of the ambivalence of the subject and sought to develop a conscious ideology of assisted emigration, which focused on the hope of a better life, for those who left and for those who remained.
Contents: Preface and acknowledgements; 1. Introduction - belonging and local attachment; 2. The culture of local xenophobia; 3. Settlement, parochial belonging and entitlement; 4. Rural societies and their marriage patterns; 5. 'A cruel kindness': parish out-door relief, and the new poor law; 6. Nailed to the church door? Parish overseers and the new poor law; 7. Three centuries of new parishes; 8. 'Of this parish': gravestones, belonging and local attachment; 9. Conclusion - belonging, parish and community; Select bibliography. Summary: What role did the parish play in people's lives in England and Wales between 1700 and the mid-twentieth century? By comparison with globalisation and its dislocating effects, the book stresses how important parochial belonging once was. Professor Snell discusses themes such as settlement law and practice, marriage patterns, cultures of local xenophobia, the continuance of out-door relief in people's own parishes under the new poor law, the many new parishes of the period and their effects upon people's local attachments. The book highlights the continuing vitality of the parish as a unit in people's lives, and the administration associated with it. It employs a variety of historical methods, and makes important contributions to the history of welfare, community identity and belonging. It is highly relevant to the modern themes of globalisation, de-localisation, and the decline of community, helping to set such changes and their consequences into local historical perspective. This book is available from Cambridge University Press at http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521862929 Metadata only entry
Passages funded by Australia's colonial governments accounted for 56 per cent of all arrivals from the United Kingdom between 1831 and 1860. In concert with a range of private, Colonial Office, and Poor Law sources in the UK, analysis of data on the emigrants' age, sex, occupation, county of origin, literacy, and religious persuasion, collected by colonial Immigration Agents, challenges the traditional view of Australia's government immigrants. Rather than indigent misfits, shovelled out by a system anxious to rid the UK of its poor, they were primarily well-informed, self-selecting, literate individuals who often sought help from philanthropic agencies or their local parish to enable them to finance their passage deposit, mandatory clothing, and travel to the port of embarkation. Comparative analysis of data on occupation and county of origin, which suggests that they were not the spillover of the North America-bound streams, further challenges the prevailing view.
One of the great themes of modern history is the movement of poor people across the face of the earth. For individuals and families the economic and psychological costs of these transoceanic migrations were severe. But they did not prevent millions of agriculturalists and proletarians from Europe reaching the new worlds in both the Atlantic and the Pacific basins in the nineteenth century. These people, in their myriad voyages, shifted the demographic balance of the continents and created new economies and societies wherever they went. The means by which these emigrations were achieved are little explored.
Most emigrants directed themselves to the cheapest destinations. The Irish, for instance, migrated primarily to England, Scotland, and North America. The general account of British and European emigration in the nineteenth century demonstrates that the poor were not well placed to raise the costs of emigration or to insert themselves into the elaborate arrangements required for intercontinental migration. Usually the poor came last in the sequence of emigration.
The passage to Australasia was the longest and the most expensive of these migrations. From its foundation as a penal colony in 1788, New South Wales depended almost entirely on convict labor during its first four decades. Unambiguous government sanction for free immigration emerged only at the end of the 1820s, when new plans were devised to encourage certain categories of emigrants from the British population. As each of the new Australian colonies was developed so the dependence on convict labor diminished.
In 1832, a royal commission was appointed to investigate the operation of the poor laws in England and Wales, and two years later legislation was adopted on the basis of the commission's recommendations. For most contemporaries the passage of this measure, the so-called New Poor Law, seemed to promise significant, perhaps even radical, change in the administration of poor relief. An ancient system of parochial government was to be supplanted in the localities by a series of larger poor law unions and boards of guardians, whose discretion was to be limited by responsibility to a national bureaucratic authority in London. No less dramatic was the relief policy that the new law envisioned. It was generally understood that the poor law commissioners appointed under the act were to direct their main efforts to the establishment of a system of workhouses, wherein relief could be accorded under conditions that rendered the pauper's lot “less eligible,” that is, less attractive, than that of the poorest independent laborer. Through such means, it was hoped, an end might be made to what was seen as a long-established and widespread practice of supplementing the inadequate wages of the laboring poor out of the poor rates.
While the tendency of recent work has been to question the practical effect of this legislation on the actual distribution of aid, the problem remains of explaining the motivations and intentions of the men who promoted a measure of such seemingly abundant and far-reaching implications.
Contents: Preface; Introduction; 1. Agricultural seasonal unemployment, the standard of living, and women's work, 1690-1860; 2. Social relations - the decline of service; 3. Social relations - the poor law; 4. Enclosure and employment - the social consequences of enclosure; 5. The decline of apprenticeship; 6. The apprenticeship of women; 7. The family; 8. Thomas Hardy, rural Dorset, and the family; Appendix; Bibliography; Index. Summary: This collection of inter-connected essays is concerned with the impact of social and economic change upon the rural labouring poor and artisans in England, and combines a sensitive understanding of their social priorities with innovative quantitative analysis. It is based on an impressive range of sources, and its particular significance arises from the pioneering use made of a largely neglected archival source - settlement records - to address questions of central importance in English social and economic history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Levels of employment, wage rates, poor relief, the sexual division of labour, the social consequences of enclosure, the decline of farm service and traditional apprenticeship, and th equality of family life are amongst the issues discussed in a profound re-assessment of a perennial problem: the standard of living (in its widest sense) of the labouring poor during the period of industrialisation. The author's conclusions challenge much of the prevailing orthodoxy, and his extensive use of literary and attitudinal material is closely integrated with the quantitative restatement of an interpretation that owes much to the older tradition of the Hammonds' Village Labourer. Metadata only entry This book is available from Cambridge University Press at http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521335584
A substantial history of the physical environments in which the eighteenth-century poor lived has yet to be written. The material world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has recently become an increasing focus for the work of historians.1 The growing demand for products and services, and changing patterns of consumer behaviour, have each received fairly comprehensive treatment. The extent to which these new patterns of consumption and demand extended from the middling sort to the labouring poor has, however, been largely ignored.2 While Malcolmson argues in Life and Labour in England 1700–1780 that the ‘expanding culture of consumerism … was almost entirely inaccessible to the great majority of the nation’s population’,3 the relevant parts of his book focus on the ways the poor put together a living rather than on an analysis of their material possessions. The vibrant plebeian culture of the eighteenth century — its recreations, customary practices and popular protests — has been subjected to detailed scrutiny by social historians,4 while the wide-ranging standard-of-living debate has resulted in the detailed exploitation of the limited data available on wages, prices and other indicators of changing real wage levels and overall consumption patterns.5 However, neither of these approaches has focused on the household items and everyday material world of the poor.
Thesis (D. Sc.)--University of London. "Bibliography on emigration from the United Kingdom to North America, 1783-1911": p. 356-378.
‘Family, Kinship, Community and Friendship Ties in Assisted Emigration from Cambridgeshire to Port Phillip District and Victoria
- S C Holt
- Mandler P.